How to clone your favorite scent

Say you want to recreate your favorite scent. How would one start? Most popular fragrances have LOTS of ingredients. Notes aplenty. However, you can get a close approximation (or a smell that is certainly inspired by) your fav scent by focusing on the main notes. An excellent resource for this is Fragrantica. They have a database of a dizzying number of fragrances - both commercial and indie, synthetic and natural.

Here's an example. I chose Vetiver Creed, because we recently released a new vetiver essential oil in the store. It is hydrodiffused, and it is fabulous. Blows the other vetivers I've smelled out of the water - including our synthetic version.

Step 1: Find the Fragrantica Page for your chosen fragrance. Here is the one for Vetiver Creed

Step 2: Check out the main notes. You'll typically find two lists - one is a list of what is in the perfume, and one is a list of what reviewers actually smelled when sniffing the perfume. And handily, the former is in order according to note (top, heart, base) and the latter is in order according to votes.

For this fragrance, it looks like we'll need some vetiver, citrus notes, virginia cedar, ginger, amber, and bergamot (on their website you hover over the pictures and the names appear).

Step 3: Acquire the main notes. If you can't find one, just get something similar.

Step 4: Begin experimenting.

Here's a starting point, using oils that are available in our store. (DISCLAIMER: I have never smelled Vetiver Creed, so I have no idea if this recipe approximates it. I just took the notes, and made something I liked out of them). This recipe is given in ratios (x:100), which is good if you're measuring by the drop or need to calculate for your own bottles size, but also is automatically adjusted for our 9ml bottles and 30 ml bottles.

You can use either fractionated coconut oil (FCO) or perfumer's alcohol as your base. If you do not have perfumer's alcohol, Everclear works fairly well.